Facebook buying Friendfeed, off to Tumblr

A lot can happen when you're asleep! If you're on Twitter this is already ancient history because it happened hours ago, but Facebook came completely out of left field and bought FriendFeed. I agree with what Dave Winer said about it, that the deal can only be bad news for current FriendFeed users.

To use the technical social science language I have acquired from being a super 1337 online citizen for a while now, I have a Facebook account but they still kinda creep me out and this deal rubs me the wrong way. I hate the idea of general purpose gated communities where you have to log in to access material, and while there's no evidence Facebook will simply swallow FriendFeed into people's profile page news feeds to be never seen on the public internet again, it is a possibility. Even if they don't do that, I'm sure we can look forward to some new archaic and scary terms of service.

While I had most of the feeds for my online activities connected to it, I never really used FriendFeed itself for anything except for one time quite recently. I'm thinking I'll move all my feeds onto my neglected Tumblr account and ditch FriendFeed.

One of the people commenting on the FriendFeed blog about the decision said part of the reason he liked FriendFeed was that it was a social network that wasn't Facebook! Oh well, back to Twitter for short messages which fortunately was spared.